


Previously...

by Vinnocent



Series: Wolfstuck [7]
Category: Homestuck, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Assisted Suicide, Blood and Gore, Cannibalism, Canonical Character Death, Demonic Possession, Family Feels, Humanstuck, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Psychological Torture, Stabdads, Suicide, Torture, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-05-10
Packaged: 2018-06-02 04:05:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6550006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vinnocent/pseuds/Vinnocent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of short fics about some of the events that took place before the beginning of Wolfstuck, long before a teenage Dave Strider decided to go wandering through the woods at night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Handmaid of Hell

Rin Megido glances at her watch again as she follows Sheriff Moles down the stairs to the jail cells in the basement. She wonders if these seven seconds will be subtracted from the ten minutes of visitation that he had so graciously allowed her.

As Moles opens the stairwell door and holds it open for her, she quickly checks again that her documents are in order, then she steps out into the department’s garish yellow basement. Honestly, what is with the color scheme in this place? Just because it’s publicly funded doesn’t mean they have to put in every effort to make it an egregious eyesore. Though, perhaps it’s part of the punishment…

She makes a quick note at the corner of her legal pad then follows Moles to the furthest cell. In it sits a woman with skin like night, her head shaved clean, wearing high-end business attire in a monochrome black scheme. Rin cannot help the thought that this woman is far too elegant to belong in a cell of yellow-painted concrete and iron. Her bright, light-colored eyes flick toward Rin, though she does not otherwise acknowledge the newcomers.

Moles stops in front of the cell, hands on his hips, and barks, “Alright, Snowman, listen up. This is Ms. Megido. She’s a student from Berkley. Forensic anthropology. She－”

“And criminology.”

Moles turns to glare at her. Snowman doesn’t notice. Snowman is still watching Rin with no expression.

“Criminology is the reason I’m here,” Rin reminds him, impatiently. “I told you that.”

Moles grunts and returns his attention to Snowman. He continues, “She has been given nine minutes to ask you questions. You will respond to them without violence or threats. She will then leave.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Rin hisses under her breath. Not only did it seem that he actually was going to count the ten minutes out from when they left his desk upstairs, but he was also _terrible_ at temporal mathematics; she had _nine minutes and seventeen seconds_ , thank you very much.

“Language,” Moles warns, glaring at her again.

“English, why?” Rin replies.

Moles just stares at her for a brief moment, then amends, “Eight minutes. Have fun.”

He steps away so that she may step forward. She really hates the idea of having this man at her back, even if she's fairly certain that she could slit his throat before he even drew his weapon, but arguing about his behavior would only succeed in reducing her time to nothing, and then she’d have to find another subject for her paper. Her only hope was to behave well this time, try to earn Snowman’s consent, and thus be able to continue the project from there.

Snowman is still watching. She hasn’t moved. She has said nothing. But she watches with an intent that somehow actually succeeds in making Rin connect with the moment. “Feel alive,” as some people might put it. Rin tries her best to ignore it, looks down at her notes, and asks, “Do you have a name other than Snowman?”

Snowman says nothing.

Rin considers, irritated, then decides to move on to the next question. It’s not like she’d asked for her _real_ name, but Snowman was probably smart enough to know extra aliases could help pin down the details. “You have been jailed multiple times on…” She looked down at her list. “... multiple counts of armed robbery, unlicensed possession of firearms, disorderly conduct, assault of a police officer, assault of a police dog, and vandalism. Though you have never been formally charged with such, you have been, at various times, suspected in the involvement of as many as sixty murders and deaths.” She looks up again at Snowman who is still staring at her silently. “And yet you have never faced a day in court.”

Moles attempts to step into her space to intimidate her, but she quickly steps back into his space first, ramming her elbow into his ribs. As he grunts and backs up again, she spins toward him with a carefully blank expression and says, “Excuse the accident, sir, but these things would be avoidable if you didn’t stand close enough to accidentally hit with a stray elbow or perhaps a sexual harassment complaint.”

Moles growls at her. It’s almost endearingly stupid how men think they can intimidate women by behaving even more animalistic than usual. “Look, here, you,” he snarls. “If you think I’m just going to stand by while you accuse the justice system of god-knows-what －”

“I accused no one of anything, sir,” Rin reminds him. “I simply asked her why it happened. Why would you assume that I’d say anything else? Are you implying that judges can be bought with blood money?”

He opens his mouth to speak, but she holds a hand up, and says, “Look, I have seven minutes and thirty-four seconds left. Please, do not force me to waste it on your conspiracy theories.”

“My－?!”

“Ssh,” she tells him, snapping her fingers in his face. She turns on her heal back to Snowman who _still_ hasn’t moved, “And I’d rather not waste my words on an unwilling participant. If there is absolutely no way you’re going to answer anything at all, I would appreciate some indication.”

Snowman continues staring at her. Rin can feel her seven minutes and three seconds slipping like sand through her fingers, and the waste is exasperating.

When she has six minutes and forty-eight seconds remaining, she turns sharply to Moles and says, “I apologize for wa－”

“I must have had a good lawyer.”

Rin spins back toward Snowman. “No, you didn’t,” she presses, stepping toward the cell bars eagerly. “Your lawyers were purposefully assigned because they had the absolute worst rates of success, which is to say a rate of zero － until they represented you.”

Snowman just shrugs. “Perhaps the district attorneys didn’t think I was worth the sacrifice of their…” She smiles a little. A brief glint of shining white on coal black. “... time.”

Interesting. She threatens compliance from the district attorneys, but not from the cops that repeatedly arrest her. “Why do you do these things?” Rin asks. “What is your motivation for criminal activity?”

Snowman smiles again, a confident smirk. “If I were to partake in criminal activity, I suppose it would be to breed fear.”

“Why?” Rin presses.

The smirk dies. “Because it’s the only thing I can do.”

Rin grins broadly. Her paper is going to be _amazing_. She pulls at the bars eagerly, her dissecting stare meeting Snowman’s stoney one. “Why do you believe that?” she presses further. In the back of her mind, she’s already trying to concoct ways to convince Moles to allow further interviews.

It feels like a kick in the face, when Snowman finally drops her penetrating gaze and lies back on the cell bench, dismissing Rin. “You won’t get your answers in the next five minutes,” she says. “This interview is pointless.”

“But－!”

“You’re right, though. I’ll be released within the hour. So tomorrow, I’ll find your number, and I’ll call you, and I’ll tell you when and where your next interview will be.”

Rin’s grin is back firmly in place, so wide it hurts. “Thank you! You can trust me! I’m only interested in－”

“I don’t care.” Snowman glances toward her one last time with an expression that Rin can’t easily read. Regret? Pity? Analysis? Predation? “If you accept these terms, you will never be released from them.”

Rin shrugs, ignoring Moles’s protests behind her. “I’m not afraid,” she insists.

“And you never will be again,” says Snowman.


	2. The Rogue Summoner

“Okay, and, see when I say ‘be really quiet,’ what I mean is that, well, I really _really_ mean it, okay boys?” Onesiphoros tells his sons as he tightens the straps of the backpack on Rufioh’s shoulders. Well, he’s more telling Rufioh. Tavros is barely old enough to stand, much less run. Rufioh will have to manage both his sleepy brother and a knapsack full of heavy books and documents.

The door to the basement slams open, and Rufioh nearly jumps out of his skin, spinning toward the door with his ashwood spear raised. “I can’t find the damned cat!” Mindfang shouts as she hurries down the stairs with one of the twins tucked up under her left arm and the other hanging off her neck. Except she’s not hurrying. She’s tripping over her own feet like a drunkard, gripping the railing tightly to keep from tumbling all the way down.

Shit. “Shit!” Onesiphoros pushes the boys into the hiding place under the stairs where little Porrim already clutches her sleeping sister and the half-asleep Vantas brothers. He hesitates briefly, then tells them, “Uh, don’t repeat that.”

“NITRAM!”

“Right!” Onesiphoros races back around the stairs, meeting her halfway and pulling the kits off her. Mituna gives him a shock that rattles his teeth and almost makes him falter on the stairs. Funnily enough, it’s Mindfang who reaches out to steady him. That’s when he sees the slash across her arm, deep and caked with blood. Her sleeve is in ribbons and soaked through with blood. She’s got a tourniquet tied around the arm just above it though, trying to keep the poison from spreading.

“They’re already here,” he hisses. It’s not really a question, and he already knows the answer.

“They can track blood, Nitram,” she reminds him. “We have to hurry.”

“Right.” Onesiphoros leaps down the remaining stairs, turns on his heel and bundles the kits into Porrim’s arms. “Remember: Quiet!” He returns his attention to Mindfang, who has sat down on the stairs and is currently checking over her automatic rifle. He hurries up to her, pulling two vials out of his pocket: ashwood ash and tincture of aconite. He shoves her gun out of the way and kneels on the step next to her, pouring both vials directly into the wound haphazardly. 

“OW!” Mindfang snaps with an offended tone.

“It will slow down the poison,” he tells her. He tosses the vials aside and helps her to her feet.

“But not stop it?”

“We have to go.” He pulls her arm as he starts up the stairs, but Mindfang pulls back.

“I’ll stay down here,” she says sharply. “I can sit still to guard them. Reserve my energy just for shooting.”

But Onesiphoros shakes his head. “No, they’ll smell your wound. Just like you said.”

“They can smell the _children_ just as easily.”

“We still need to find Kitty and her kids.”

“Why? Phos, we already know how this goes.”

His hands clench with the wave of betrayal and loss that he’s been battling ever since Astrophel spilled the beans only a few nights ago. Only long enough for Onesiphoros to try to call in some favors, but not long enough to form a plan. Especially without Benoni’s help. Benoni, it seemed, had given up fighting this long, long ago. “A dream is just a dream,” he lies.

“You called me here for a dream?” she counters.

From the interior of the house, they hear a loud crash, and the lights flicker. It’s immediately followed by Benoni’s voice, calm and even. Too calm and even to hear the words. It doesn’t matter. They were already told what he’d say. _You’re not welcome here_.

Onesiphoros and Mindfang both duck and clamp their hands over their ears as Benoni’s words are met by a banshee scream. Anything remotely fragile in the basement － lightbulbs, old bottles, someone’s heirloom flower vase － vibrate and explode. This is the part where Astrophel falls, unconscious, blood streaming from his ears. That scream of rage is Dolores, charging Snowman directly. Those are Snowman’s bullets. Everyone is screaming now.

He has already been told how this goes.

It doesn’t matter.

It can’t matter.

There’s no way that he isn’t fighting this.

He turns to Mindfang. “You came for a reason,” he reminds her.

She shrugs. The shrug is noticeably lopsided. “What’s the point in fighting such an epically badass fate?” she says. She smiles a smile that breaks your heart. She looks up the stairs. There is no time to debate this. She turns and bends over the railing. “Hey, Canimal!”

Porrim peeks out from the hiding place with an angry glare. “We’re called－”

“Don’t care! Look, this basement is fucked, so there’s gotta be like some rats and lizards and whatnot. Maybe you’ll be lucky and find a stray cat no one noticed,” Mindfang snarls. “Do yourselves a favor and kill the fuck out of it. All of it. I want this basement to _stink_ of dead things. I want it to stink so badly of already dead shit that there is no possible way anyone could sniff out a cluster of children. You got me? Go!”

She doesn’t wait to make sure that Porrim obeys. The kids don’t have a place in this. That has been the one saving grace. The kids don’t have a place in this.

Onesiphoros follows Mindfang up the stairs just as a huge kanima charges toward them. Mindfang unloads right into its chest as Onesiphoros slams the door shut behind them and breaks the key off in the lock with a swift kick. Mindfang drops against the nearest wall and unloads more bullets into the adjoining hall. Onesiphoros shoves his shoulder up under her injured arm and pulls her to her feet, supporting her weight as they run toward the main room, hoping to draw the bask of kanimas toward them and away from the periphery rooms, giving others a better chance of escape.

Mindfang sprays the house with bullets with no hesitation, simply pulling him to a stop any time she needed to reload. He uses his spear any time the kanimas get past her fire, but it is admittedly not an ideal weapon for close quarters combat with multiple enemies. One even gets close enough to nearly claw him.

Together, they spill out into the entranceway, collapsing with their backs against the front door. They aren’t leaving. That isn’t their job here. Onesiphoros steadies his spear in his hands as she walks down the stairs from the second floor toward them. The Handmaid of Hell. She’s pale as porcelain with night-black hair and eyes that weep profusely despite her sneering, vicious expression. She wears an elegant, expensive kimono, and not one drop of blood has hit it yet.

Mindfang raises her rifle, but it’s wobbling. The kanima paralysis toxin has been spreading. “Megido,” Mindfang snarls.

Rin Megido pauses on the stairs to consider the two of them with vicious, mocking amusement. “Serket and Nitram. How adorable. You do know how this ends, yes? You’ve been told?”

Onesiphoros answers only by stepping forward and raising his spear with careful aim.

“I’m jealous, you know,” she says. “I’ve felt so many deaths, but I live through them all. Do you have any idea how desperate I am to finally put an end to this merciless boredom?” She grins broadly and spreads her arms. “So come to me. Come on, Summoner. Change your fate.”

He tries. He really does. He tenses to throw. But somehow, his hand comes down instead of forward. His muscles along his left side begin to relax one by one. He glances to his right shoulder to see that those kanima claws did not _nearly_ hit him; he'd simply been too full of adrenaline to notice the pain.

“Phos!” Mindfang cries. Not as loudly as she could have. She’s having difficulty breathing. She’s collapsed at the foot of the door, her gun lying across her lap. Above them, Megido laughs her ass off.

Onesiphoros collapses next to her and hangs his head. “I’m sorry. God, I’m so sorry.”

“Phos…”

“I never should have tried to make this work…”

“Phos, I need you.”

He turns to look at her. Even now, her gaze is fierce and decisive, and he loves her.

“You made me a promise, Phos,” she hisses through shallow breath. “You made me a promise that I would never be killed by an enemy, by one of these monsters. You promised me that. I earned it, Phos. I deserve my dignity, don’t I?”

He nods heavily and tries not to cry. He doesn’t want to waste the energy on it. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I promised.”

And with the last of his strength, he lifts his spear in his other hand.


	3. Doom's Heir

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay firstly, check out the changed tags. This one gets gross, y'all. What's revealed in this chapter will be revealed again later in fic (with less explicit detail) if you want to sit this chapter out.
> 
> Secondly, if you're not familiar with Teen Wolf mythology, supposedly kitsune can manifest their tails physically as tanto knives. These knives can then be used for magical purposes such as summoning oni and commanding said oni. They can also supposedly be stolen and utilized by others. (According to mythology, tails are gained every one hundred years, maxing out at nine; Teen Wolf is unclear on the subject, at least up to the point I've watched. I've also decided to make the knife uses more general than just onis.)

Spinneret Serket (There’s no way that’s her real name.) pulls his children from his arms as the house erupts into panic. He doesn’t want to trust her with them. He doesn’t have a choice. She runs down the hall with them, toward the stairs, then falls onto her back in order to dodge a kanima leaping straight at her. Astrophel blasts the lizard back away from her before it even lands, and she has already rolled onto her feet and disappeared from sight. He hurries after her only in time to see her leap over the stair railing to dodge another, which he also throws aside. How many of these things are there? “BENONI!” he shouts back into the halls. He has to trust her with the children. He has to trust her with the children because he is the most powerful fighter the Speakers have. “BENONI! WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?!”

An unearthly scream, and Astrophel turns to face the opposite hallway. A door at the far end erupts open, and Benoni stumbles out, covered in blood splatter. For an instant, Astrophel wants to scream, but it immediately passes when he recognizes the pattern as blood that has been ejected _onto_ Benoni instead of _from_ him, and he grins instead. “BENONI!” he calls.

Benoni looks across the hall to him and forces a smile back, but the smile has no faith. He has never looked sadder, frailer, smaller. Astrophel hesitates. Benoni had told him, told him already what would happen, but they wouldn’t have stayed if it wasn’t the right thing to do. This has to be the right thing to do. It will be okay. It will be okay because Serket has the children.

Dolores steps out into the hall from the room Benoni had just absconded from. She’s plastered in gore that drips down from her fang-ridden mouth, and her eyes are wild with hunger. Benoni turns back to her and says something, makes a pacifying gesture. On the third floor, above them, Astrophel hears someone screaming. Several someones. The screams are terrified and hurt. He starts toward the stairs upward, and Benoni and Dolores hurry after him, but they are all three stopped by the sound of the front door being kicked in. They turn to see the entrance of a woman with a shaven head and skin as dark as the night. There’s a doll hanging off her neck, down her back like a backpack. Weird.

She looks up the stairs toward them without even a hint of expression. She raises a sawed-off shotgun and widens her stance but doesn’t yet aim it at them or anyone else.

The three of them exchange glances. “Show time,” Astrophel hisses, energy crackling along his skin. Something changes in Benoni’s face. He forgets his grief, his helplessness, as he looks down at Snowman, and his face changes to one of absolute indignance on this intrusion of a sacred space, and this, _this_ , is why Astrophel loves him enough to die.

Benoni storms back to the stairs to the first floor with wide, purposeful strides, and Dolores and Astrophel quickly flank him. He glowers down at Snowman. “You are not welcome here!” he snarls with a voice that seems to fill the whole house with the declaration. “So fuck off!”

Astrophel snickers at that, but his amusement doesn’t last. The smirk is wiped off his face when a new figure emerges. She steps around from behind her companion, and he is frozen by the sight of her. She’s not just beautiful; she’s a glorious monument to the old world. Each kimono layer is hand dyed silk with highly detailed embroidery, the like of which supposedly just isn’t created anymore. Her makeup, too, is old style, like his mother might have worn when she was only a mere century old. Her hair is impeccably styled and bejeweled as though she thinks she’s fucking royalty, and she walks like it, too. She is a testament to the power and wealth of an empire fallen. She looks up at him and smirks the way the Yamato always do to him before she opens her mouth exactly the way he was told that she would.

He won’t even remember falling.

It’s seven days before Condolence Peixes deigns to look in on her prisoners. His wrists are raw and painful from six days of desperate tugging at the chains that hold him standing. After last night, there isn’t a point to tugging anymore. All that’s left to do is to try to breathe as shallowly as possible to try to keep the wounds from reopening again. But on that seventh day, when he opens his eyes, he finds Condolence Peixes standing there, waiting for his attention.

Her eyes roam over his figure, his rattling breath and shaking muscles, his blood-drenched arms, and yesterday’s vomit crusted on the front of his shirt. She takes it all in through narrowed eyes, curls her lip, and says, “Ew.”

“I’M GOING TO MOTHERFUCKING KILL YOU, YOU SLIME-SUCKING BITCH!” he rages, pulling at his chains without thought. She laughs at his pathetic attempts to grasp at her, and he snarls, gathers all the energy still within him. The air crackles with electricity, and he floats in the air. The chains on his feet hold him down, so he only floats a few inches, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not the floating that matters. The air crackles and sparks and snaps.

Condolence Peixes laughs at him. Why. Why won’t his electricity burn her? Why won’t she die? “Die!” he screams at her. “Die, demon, die die die! Fucking die already!”

He’s crying. Streams of tears crackling across his cheeks and burning away in steam. He screams and pulls and pushes his power as far as he can and then further more. He screams and he screams until there’s nothing left inside him. And when he sags again in his chains, empty and defeated, she steps closer to him, lifts his chin to look her in the eyes, waits for him to do so, then drops his chin again to look at her cleavage, from which she pulls a knife. _His_ knife. His tail.

“Thass mine,” he hisses, barely audible. God, he’s so tired.

“The only one,” she says. She sounds irritated. “If I’d known you were so young, I might have waited longer. Let you cook a bit more. But I suppose I can just keep you here until you’ve finished producing them all. That should only take, what? Eight more centuries?”

He wants to spit in her face, but he hasn’t got the energy for it anymore.

Smiling, she trails the knife edge of his tail along the dried tracks of his tears. “Are you hungry?” she asks with a sort of fake pity. “It’s been what? Seven days? Dear me. And that was a lot of energy you just used.”

“Fuck off,” he grunts.

She laughs at him again and tucks the knife away again in her cleavage. She nods to the scene behind her, at the far end of the room, where Dolores has been chained to her intended victim, unable to escape for so many days the insatiable hunger she’d been born into. She hasn’t stopped crying for over a day. “You can always ask her for a share of hers,” Condolence tells him.

“Shut up and kill me already,” Astrophel pleads.

Condolence tilts her head at him as though she’s actually considering it. Then, she shrugs. “Sure,” she says with a smile. “In eight hundred years.”

She laughs as she leaves.

Twelve days later, there’s nothing left of Benoni Vantas but the skull, and even then Astrophel can hear the gentle scrape of Dolores’s teeth against the bone as she kisses it over and over and whispers apologies. She’s still hungry. She’s hungry and sorry and hasn’t stopped crying. She’ll never not cry again. He knows that like he knows what’s coming. He’s sapping all his strength trying to kill Condolence during her visits. So much he can barely breathe, but she’s put him on IV now. There’s something magical in it, he doesn’t know what. But he can feel life flow back into him. Just enough to keep him going. She’ll keep this up as long as she needs to, as long as she wants to.

Fuck that.

Fuck eight hundred years. He won't give her a single fucking day. She can't make him.

“Dolores,” he whispers.

She doesn’t look up at him.

“ _Dolores_ ,” he snaps.

With a grieved moan, she clutches Benoni’s skull to her chest and bows away from Astrophel, turning her back to him.

“I just… I wanted to let you know I’m sorry,” he says. “I want you to know that. I’d take you with me if I could.”

She glances over her shoulder at him, casting a questioning look from between strands of filthy hair.

“Do me a favor and eat the bitch,” he tells her. “For me? For all of us?”

She turns away from him again.

“You were the best mother any of us ever had, you know. He loved you so much. He does, I know it,” he rambles, and she responds only with a loud sob. “And he taught us to love you too. You taught us to love you. People like this bitch, they see a monster and a tool. But you’ve got a heart bigger than this universe. Far, far bigger than mine. That’s why I can’t take you with me, Dolores. Because I’m a fucking bastard. I hate her, Dolores. All that peace and love and understanding crap, I tried, I really did. I wanted to be good for him, but I never was. They think you’re a monster, Dolorosa, but you’re not. You’re not. They think that _because they’ve never seen_ ** _us_**.”

He twists his hands, ignoring his pain, and grabs his chains. He uses all his magic-given strength to hold himself steady on the upper chains while pulling up his feet as much as the lower chains will allow. It takes a few tries, but he finally grasps the trailing IV tube between the soles of his shoes, and he gives it a hard yank, dislodging the needle from his vein.

And then he closes his eyes, and he summons all the hate and anger boiling in his stomach, and he prays. He prays for vengeance. He prays for misery and chaos. “Make her regret this,” he snarls under his breath. “Make it hurt. Make her look back on what she’s done to us and hate us for not killing her first.”

 _And what do I get?_ the nogitsune whispers into his mind.

“My life and my body,” says Astrophel. “All of it. The entire eight hundred years that could have been. Take it. Destroy me. Make me the tool by which you exact your vengeance.”

The nogitsune coils around his soul with a pleased little thrum of void energy. _Yes,_ it agrees. _Yes, this I will take._

And then it severs Astrophel’s soul from his life with a vicious tear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise not ALL of these chapters will be such huge downers. It's just that they're going in astrological order, so having already decided which ones will be lighter and which will be more dramatic, sometimes all the drama ends up smashed together in a lump. Sorry.
> 
> I'm cutting my writing time down to weekends because I've got a lot of projects going on right now. The good news is that the missus and I have spent most of this past weekend talking out how this series ends... and plotting the next one. So, not only can I promise that this definitely won't be abandoned before completion, I can also tell you that we'll be embarking on a Steamstuck au right afterward. Right now it's undergoing some MAJOR world-building. ;)


	4. Fate of the Seer

Benoni Vantas is jailed pending charges when he’s accused of abducting a foster child for induction into arcane ritual. He doesn’t know what that means. Sheriff Johansen shrugs it off.

In jail, he meets a man named Jack, but Jack is called Slick, and Benoni suspects that neither is his birth name. It would be impolite to ask, and Benoni doesn’t care. What he knows, when he looks at this man, is that Jack will come into his life just once more. Well, into his house. They won’t meet. But Jack will save his children. And, really, that's all Benoni needs to know about the man.

The girl he is accused of stealing turns out to be Rubena Pyrope, who is nineteen-years-old and _incensed_. “I haven’t lived in that foster home for months!” she shouts at the sheriff. “I’ve never even met these Spooners－”

“Speakers,” Johansen corrects her. He sounds exhausted. He has probably been the most understanding about Benoni’s endeavors of any non-supernatural that Benoni has met, and Benoni regrets the bloody, painful end that he’ll come to.

“What _ever_!” she shouts. “You don’t return a phone call to your not-parents for a few weeks, and suddenly you’ve been kidnapped by cultists!”

“Hippies,” Johansen corrects again.

“Is there even a difference?!” she demands.

Johansen shrugs apathetically. “So you’re saying that you drop the charges?”

“Yeah, sure, whatever,” she grumbles. “Point is that what they said isn’t _true_.”

The sheriff doesn’t care. He nods to the guard and says, “Alright, let him out.”

It takes Rubena longer to fill out her paperwork than it takes Benoni to fill out his by maybe a minute. So he takes his time on the stairs even though they only climb one floor. The sheriff always takes the elevator.

She pauses in the stairwell when she sees him ahead of her. He climbs to the mid-level landing, then turns to her. “Yes?” he asks.

“There a reason you’re climbing the stairs like you’re arthritic?” she asks. Her head is cocked sideways, her eyes narrowed, her muscles tense. She’s suspicious and wary but unafraid.

“Yes, I wanted to speak to you.”

She grins wide and malevolent. “Well, that’s not suspicious at all!” she proclaims. “And why shouldn’t I run screaming down the single step to that door directly behind me to where the cops are?”

Benoni shrugs. “I suppose you could, if you wanted,” he says. “I just wanted to tell you that the man in the cell beside me, Jack Noir － or Spades Slick, if you like － is a bad man, but he’s not the man who did the bad thing they’re accusing him of. That would be a woman who is called Snowman.”

Rubena glowers up at him. “And why the fuck do I care?”

“Because one day, you’re going to be an utterly amazing defense lawyer and then prosecutor,” he says. “So why not start now?”

She blinks up at him for a moment. Then she laughs. “Oh, you can read the future, huh? That’s your cult schtick? I’m supposed to be so impressed that I agree to make you my god?”

“I can read any bloodline once it has intersected with my own,” he says. “And it doesn’t matter to me what you think of me, but I’d prefer you didn’t do anything so ludicrous as what you’re suggesting, not that I really believe you would.”

“Yeah?” she says. “Okay, so what happens if I follow you out of here? Get to know you a bit better?”

“In two years, you’ll be found hanging off the back balcony of my home by your neck after the Felt attempt to murder you,” he says.

She stops grinning. She watches him for a very long moment. Finally, she says, “Attempt?”

“You’ll live,” he tells her. “Two years isn’t enough to get through law school, after all.”

She can’t help the small laugh that escapes at that, one small huff, but her wariness is back. It's understandable, considering what he just told her. “Okay, Mr. Fortune-Teller,” she says. “So what happens if I go my own way and never see you again?”

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I can’t see things that aren't likely.”

She snorts again. “And what’s to become of you, huh?”

“I’ll be eaten alive by my mother.”

Rubena’s eyes go wide as she is startled by this answer. For the first time, she glances behind her to the jail door, to the safety of the police.

“It’s not her fault,” Benoni says, trying to calm her. “She was born a man-eater, and she’s been far more successful at fighting those instincts than most of her kin. She eats large portions of raw animal meat, practices meditation, and expends her violence on animals in the forest to wear herself out,” he explains. “She never wanted to be responsible for another life, afraid of her own instincts, but she took me in nonetheless, and has been an amazing mother. It is for that that she will be punished. Beginning to see the truth I spread as a threat, the Felt will come after us at the wishes of a Demon-Alpha. I, my mother, and my boyfriend will be abducted. I will be chained to her, he will be chained at a safer distance, and we will be left abandoned until she can’t fight her hunger and her instinct any longer. The last thing I will tell her is that I love her and forgive her and that none of this is her fault. She won’t ever believe me.”

“ _Why the ever-loving fuck would you tell me something like that?_ ” Rubena screeches. “ _What the hell is wrong with you?!_ ”

Benoni has already turned away from her, trying to stop the tears he hadn’t meant to shed. “I－ I’m sorry,” he says, voice raw. “I hadn’t meant－ Those details－” He’s not actually sure what he wants to say now, so he stops. He’d known that he should talk to her, because of the way their blood intertwined, but he hadn’t known what he should say. Jack had honestly been the first excuse to pop into his head, and now he wishes that he had stuck with it.

He doesn’t realize that she’s come up to the landing until her small hand pulls roughly at his shoulder, forcing him to turn around to face her. She eyes his red, raw, wet face with scientific interest, scowling faintly. “I think maybe you've never told anyone that before,” she says. “Even though you believe it. You haven’t told your mother, have you?”

“I… I will,” he says, though he isn’t sure at the moment if it’s true. If he’ll ever be brave enough. “I just… not yet.”

“So what?” she demands, fingers tightening angrily on his shoulder but not letting him go. “What, you can tell the future, but you can’t change it? No matter how horrible?”

“I… I could,” he admits.

“Then why the hell wouldn’t you?” she demands angrily.

“Because we aren’t the heroes,” he says. “If I… If I fight this, if I choose a more successful strategy for handling it, I can buy myself, my family, and my friends… I can buy us a little more time, I think. But it won’t do any good. We’ll still die. Not as gruesomely, but we will die, and we will not be remembered as anything more than a warning to others.”

“But you’ll have more time, and your mother won’t eat you, and－”

“And our children will die,” he tells her, and he’s crying again, but he can’t stop it. “My mother, myself, my girlfriend, my boyfriend, my friends, we all have children. There will even be a few more within the next couple years. There are very, very few timelines where they live through this, but… But if I die in two years… In two years, Spades Slick will have formed the Midnight Crew and will have engaged in a turf war against the Felt, who he believes to merely be another gang. When he hears that the Felt have been hired to kill the Speakers, he’ll come not to defend us but to have an enclosed space in which to fight them. But it is there that he and his crew will see the true nature of the Felt, and they will realize that they are unprepared. In their escape of the house, they will find six of our children hiding, and they will rescue them.

“Our children will grow and become strong. Katherine will raise her girls in a bond stronger than any other family has ever known, and they will approach the world with the same strength of heart. My mother’s oldest, Porrim will be forced to make the hardest choice when she abandons the other children in order to put space between little Kanaya and the scent of blood before their control is lost. They will spend their lives trying to reunite with the others and tell them the truth of what happened. Rufioh, Kankri, Mituna, Sollux, Tavros, and Karkat will be raised by the Midnight Crew, and they will learn survival, self-discipline, and, eventually, truth. And then… And then, finally, the actual heroes, the knights and the princes and the page, they will save this city and ensure the ongoing safety of my family.”

Rubena is in his face, meeting him eye to eye like she thinks she can see into his soul. He’s not entirely sure that she can’t. “How long have you known Spades Slick?” she asks.

“Since yesterday,” he tells her.

“You’ve been attached to this future since _yesterday_?” she demands.

“It’s the only good one I’ve ever seen,” he answers honestly.

“And how long have you been convinced of my involvement?”

“Uh…” Benoni blinks at her and tries to think. “How long ago did you come into the jail?”

“Jegus.” She pushes him away from her roughly in disgust. “You’re probably the biggest idiot I’ve ever met, and I can’t believe I’m agreeing to this.”

“You’re－?” He blinks at her. “I’m sorry; I think I’ve lost track of this conversation.”

“I’m going to be your lawyer,” she says. “Because you’re a complete fucking moron, and you need all the help you can get.”

He blinks at her some more. When her words finally register, he can’t help smiling in relief. He wipes his face with his sleeve. “Thanks,” he says.


	5. Chapter 5

He is a tall man. She feels like she’s looking up and up and up. She feels like his eyes are stars peering down at her with the judgement of a wrathful god.

He is a broad man. Built like a wall. She’s fast and powerful, but as she sits there in the cool night air, clutching her kittens on someone else’s suburban lawn, she knows that there is no way around him by running.

The point of his arrow is aimed true, right at her left eye. The bowstring quietly groans its eagerness for release. But Katherine is unafraid. She needs to be unafraid in order for this to work. The incessant shaking in her frame? The way she clutches her kittens tight enough to bruise, close enough to hear her heartbeat? That isn’t fear. She can’t let it be fear.

His arrow is aimed. His bowstring is pulled. His shoulders shake with the weight of his decision. Neither of them move. Her kittens squirm against her, whimpering and uncertain, but she only clutches them tighter.

She lifts her head. “He told me already that you won’t do it,” she says.

Slowly, The Executioner relaxes his bowstring and lowers his arrow. His shoulders go lax with a sort of relieved grief. “What now?” he says.

“Live,” she says, “and tell.” And then she and her kittens are gone into the night.

Down the block, at the only house with its lights on this early-late, screams begin to erupt. Inhuman figures scale the exterior walls and slide into unlatched windows. Down the block, in the only house with its lights on this early-late, her family is dying without her.


End file.
